The Celestial Clock

Welcome to my third and final Action Project for the Winter 2019 STEAM course Light, Sound and Time. Not only am I wrapping up my class but I’m wrapping up the unit, Time. During this unit, we learned about a few science principles having to do with time like longitude and latitude, and time zones. For this unit, my classmates and I had a field experience at the planetarium. The most relevant things that we saw there were telescopes and we sat in on a presentation about travelling through the universe. During this course, we had mini lessons. A mini lesson is when one of my classmates presented to the class based on a concept from a book that connected with the class. I presented about wormholes and the book that I read was A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking. Applying the “M” in STEAM, I learned about Pythagoras and arcs. I also learned how to calculate longitude.

I think that my favorite things about this course were to learn about the universe and the culture of time telling. I reflected those interests into my Action Project. The Project for this unit was to make a design of a time telling device. My design is called The Celestial Clock. This device represents time by telling the placements of the planets every 24 hours. It also tells time by having a 24 analog dial.

MW, The CC, 2019

My inspiration for this design was the astronomical clocks invented by Su Song, a Chinese scientist and astronomer, which was also operated by water. The Celestial Clock is in the shape of a cylinder. On the top of the cylinder is an analog clock and the cylinder is see through so that you can see the Milky Way and the placement of the planets. You don't have to be an astronomer to want to know where the planets are so I wanted to make a clock that's accessible for everyday people.
Here are the dimensions:

Diameter- 6.5 in
Clock circumference- 20.42
Height- 4.5 in
Volume- 149.32 in

MW, The Celestial Clock Arc Length, 2019

The process of making this design wasn’t that hard because during class we had to research time telling devices so I already knew what I liked after further researching these devices. This design is purposeful for people who are into astronomy. I really wanted to make a physical version of my design and I might because it seems like such a cool idea. I learned a lot and it was fun to incorporate history and theory into a STEAM class.